Once upon a time in Japan

2005-11-13

Once upon a time in Japan

I think I missed this the last time I posted about Kyoto U's incredible online facsimile collection: the 今昔物語集 (Konjaku monogatari shuu, or "Collection of tales of long ago"). The top section listed on that page, 透過インタフェース版 ("Transparent interface edition") has some encoding problems, but it's worth struggling through to get to the "glass view", which works like this.

Popularity factor: 5

amida:

This is so cool I forgive it for not working with Firefox and making me open up IE. Kill Bill's browser!

language:

That's fucking amazing! (And it works fine with Firefox for me. *sticks tongue out at amida*)

amida:

Must be my Flash then....

Matt:

I use Safari, and it works fine! (Except for the encodings. Safari is absolutely useless at auto-detecting encodings, so sites that use more than one are a real pain.)

The ironic thing is the manuscript they applied this technology to is one of the most legible handwritten Japanese documents I've ever seen. Let's hope they apply the technology to one of those scrolls that's just a series of wavy vertical lines next. That would REALLY be useful.

IbaDaiRon:

The Machine stops...or at least, spits and futzes and is generally in a bad humor.

Couldn't see it at home on the PB running 10.4 in any browser; get to the office where I'm still running the G5 on 10.3.9 and an older version of OmniWeb and everything shows up fine.

???

(Maybe it's the Flash, as amida suggests? Newer Macromedia stuff here.)

Cool site, though!

2005-11-13